Antimatter. The Ultimate Mirror

Physicists recently stunned the scientific community with the dramatic news that the first true atoms of antimatter had been created at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. Antimatter does not exist in the world of our everyday experience. Less than a trillionth of a gram of this antimatter would vaporize a human being. In 1928 the physicist Paul Dirac predicted the existence of antimatter in a mirror world, where the electrical charges on particles would be opposite to those of ordinary matter. This mirror world is found, fleetingly, at the quantum level, with positrons the counterpart of electrons, and antiprotons the opposite of protons. At the beginning of the universe antimatter may have been as important as matter, but today the universe seems only to be matter. How did that happen? This book introduces the Lewis Carroll world of antimatter without using technical language or equations. The author shows how the quest for symmetry in physics slowly revealed the properties of antimatter. When large particle accelerators came on line, the antimatter debris of collisions provided new clues on its properties. This is a fast-paced and lucid account of how science fiction became fact.